Four months ago, Jon Alvarez asked a seemingly innocuous question on the Poi Chat forum on Facebook that led me to one of the most mammoth undertakings of my adult life: has anybody set down definitions of all the poi moves in one place? The answer is sadly no, but it got me thinking about why that answer was no...beyond whether someone had set up a dictionary or encyclopedia, to the very heart of how we define poi tricks and discuss them online.

My first attempt at a video compilation with my new GoPro! :) A couple of these are a little hazy because I forgot to clean the lense in between takes and there was a hell of a lot of pollen in the air. Thanks so much to all the folks who let me video them! :)

This was a fun move I was taught at the Wesleyan Winter Fire Arts retreat last weekend in Midtown, Connecticut. One can think of it as being somewhat similar to both Supermans and Fantastic Fours, but uses a very different timing. Part of the fun here is the combo that leads into it, which has several steps and looks more difficult and complex than it really is.

Chris Kelly does this really nifty 3-poi trick that I edited into the Top 10 video for this year where he does a CAP going one way and a point iso vs extension going the other way. His version has a CAP in the opposite hand, but I found I could synchronize this trick with a static spin to create some lovely tribrid lines. Demonstrated here in both opposites and same direction.

Silly, sloppy practice in Dupont Circle for my annual MLK Day flow video tradition ;) Sometimes I get really into a song that I know everyone else is going to hate...and then I love the song that much more anyway!

It's impossible to overstate how silly a move this is--performing barrel rolls with a 3-beat superman! Here's the basic idea: take one half of a normal barrel roll and one half of a 2-beat weave and you can get a bit of a barrel roll to work with the superman. It's not a full barrel roll, unfortunately (don't know if that's even possible with a superman), but it is entertaining to try ;) Beware tangles!

A few people have been asking about this move in the online poi forums over the past couple months--Zan shows off a version of it in the Arizona Transmission video, but as of yet I wasn't aware of much other work being done on it in the wider community. Yesterday I managed to get the move down fairly consistently (at the cost of the callouses in between my ring finger and pinkie :-/) and was happy to find that the method I've been teaching to learn Zan's Diamond in my Fundamentals of Tech class totally works for the one-handed version, too.

Last week in New York, Noel taught me this fun variant on the Fantastic Four. One of the things I really dig about it is that it really is the Fantastic Four we all know and love with only one significant tweak, so if you've already got the FF, this move isn't so huge a leap. 3-beat, though? Not sure if the name really encompasses it.